Metered Access

Crain's Detroit Business is a metered site. Print and digital subscribers have unlimited access to stories, but registered users are limited to eight stories every 30 days. After viewing three metered stories, you'll be asked to register or log in. After eight more stories in 30 days, you'll be asked to subscribe.

A baroque crowd of more than 107,000 people — including one dressed as the Cheshire Cat and another as Fred Flintstone — passed through Hart Plaza this weekend for the annual three-day Movement electronic dance music festival, organizers said.

Attendance specifics are not yet available, but they at least matched the past two years, said Morin Yousif, spokeswoman for Movement producer Ferndale-based Paxahau Promotions Group LLC.

At least 35,000 or more attended each day, she said, to see more than 130 acts across five performance areas.

New this year were local food trucks, such as El Guapo Grill, Mac Shack, The Grindhouse and Tuktuk-Tuktuk.

Also new was the Silent Disco performance area, co-sponsored by Ford Motor Co., in which attendees listened to DJs via headphones rather than dancing to music pulsating from open-air speakers.

Revenue totals were not yet available.

Paxahau co-founder and Movement producer Jason Huvaere has told Crain’s in the past that ticket sales account for about 70 percent of the event’s revenue, and about $1 million in revenue is needed to cover the festival’s costs.

Corporation and media sponsorships account for about 20 percent of Movement’s revenue. Food is the final 10 percent.

While she didn’t have an expense total, Yousif said the production costs to stage Movement have increased past that $1 million.

Tickets also have increased. A three-day pass was $130, while a VIP pass for the weekend was $260. In 2011, the three-day general admission pass was $80 and a VIP pass was $150.

The festival moved to a paid-entry event in 2005 after financial troubles in the mid-2000s. Attendance before the establishment of paid entry to what was formerly called the Detroit Electronic Music Festival and other names was said to have been about 1 million. But insiders have said that number was inflated.

Paxahau took over the event in 2006, settling several years of disputes and confusion over the festival, which was established in 2000.

Huvaere and Sam Fotias, Paxahau’s director of operations, were listed at No. 44 by Rolling Stone earlier this year in the magazine’s top 50 most important people in electronic dance music.

Detroit is considered by many as the birthplace of techno music, where it exploded in the 1980s thanks to notables such as Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins and Derrick May.

Carol Marvin, who founded DEMF, announced plans last fall to bring it back at Campus Martius and Ford Field for Fourth of July weekend, but rescheduled it for 2015 because of the M-1 Rail streetcar construction. Marvin hadn’t been involved in the techno music festival since 2002. There was legal wrangling for some time over the DEMF name, which fans still casually use to refer to what became Movement under Paxahau.

Marvin’s Pop Culture Media Inc. originally co-produced DEMF with the Detroit Recreation Department. The city no longer subsidizes the techno event at Hart Plaza.